Morning

“Everyone wants a message and there is none,” says Stephanie, in a powerful monologue at the end of Morning. It’s a nihilistic but neat full stop on a challenging, slightly alienating new work from renowned playwright Simon Stephens.

Developed with the Young Company at London’s Lyric Hammermsith and the Junges Theatre in Basel, Switzerland, Morning is a sea of abstraction and despair. And though it has its flaws, it’s encouraging to see young actors engage in such an experimental work at the Fringe.

Stephanie is a projection of everything adults fear in teenagers, and everything teenagers fear about their own lives. She’s devastated because her best friend is leaving town; she thinks everyone finds her annoying; her mother is dying of cancer. As a dramatic character she grates, but this isn’t meant to be naturalistic theatre. There’s a loose plot and the stage is cluttered with odd objects: a large empty fridge, a laptop and sound control panel, an empty fish tank. It’s a series of disparate images that don’t fit together – but maybe they don’t have to.

As he showed in Punk Rock, Stephens deals with the extreme end of young anguish, where the lofty desire to escape from life is pierced by the mundane realities of sitting exams. Morning doesn’t always work and its most dramatic plotline, in which Stephanie brutally kills her boyfriend, is unfulfilling. But her nightmarish world is a thrilling reminder that being young, wild and free isn’t all it’s made out to be.